Learning Geography with the Kinect Image Viewer

Description

The second in our Education Theme Week comes from one of the raising stars in the coding the Kinect for Education areas. What's the most interesting, IMHO, is that the author isn't a developer. He doesn't live and breath code. He's a teacher who saw the magic that the Kinect could bring to his classroom and just started hacking away, to the joy of his kids...

Kinect Image Viewer–Great for Geography!

Recently I had made an application for Alessio Bernardelli which allowed people to zoom in and out on galaxies, however I got thinking about the application in general. Could it be used for everyone if you could change the images in the folder. The answer is YES! I modified the application so that all you need to do is include 10 pictures in the Debug folder. Have 10 pictures named “picture1.jpg”, “picture2.jpg” and away you go. People can now get students to use their hands to zoom in and out on different pictures. They can include their own pictures in the folder and then rename them to the correct pictures.

To use the application, run the skeletal viewer application in the debug folder. Once you are running the application, there are a number of phrases you can say to get it moving.

How to use!

Hold your hands up before you say the following:

Move: – Then you can move the picture anywhere on the screen.

Zoom: – Then move your hands together and apart to zoom in and out.

“Kinect1” – Say Kinect 1 to choose this picture. Say “Kinect2” to change to picture 2 and so on and so on.

Rotate: – Then you can turn your hands to rotate the image.

Subjects

This could be really useful for for a number of subjects such as geography. You could get your students to come up and find the country from a world map. You could also get them to find the town you are looking for.

Science, you could get students to use a diagram and to zoom in on the part of the body you are looking for when doing anatomy.

Maths, you could put lots of answers on one picture and the students have to zoom into the correct answer to the formula.

The Discussion

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